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Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook

(arstechnica.com)
520 points iProject | 1 comments | 29 Nov 12 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | source
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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 14:53 UTC] No.4847958[source]▶
Every time I read this I have to think to my self how silly it is to lead an article with Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working

Thats total balony, trackpads and WiFi have been well supported in Linux for almost a decade. It is _rare_ to find a labtop that when you install la fresh modern distro on it , things don't work. Yes every now and then you get a vendor who insist on doing something different, but most of the time its a synaptic track pad ( well supported ) and a Broadcom or Intel WiFi card ( well supported ). I can remember back in 2004 taking my Government Issued Dell laptop and installing Fedora on it and everything working out of the box.

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kijin ◴[29 Nov 12 15:21 UTC] No.4848124[source]▶
Tell that to the HP Mini 210 that I bought in April 2011.

Synaptic "clickpad" trackpad that claims to support multitouch: Sorry, only with their Windows driver. Not only I don't get multitouch in Ubuntu, but I can't even click or drag/drop anything. Ubuntu 12.04 claimed to fix the issue with clickpads, but it didn't work out of the box, and even after extensive tweaking, some features were still very buggy. In the end, I switched to a laptop that has a traditional trackpad without the multitouch bullshit.

Broadcom wifi card: Works fine once you install the additional driver. But there's a catch: last time I checked, the driver didn't come with the install CD. So I have to download it in order for wifi to work ... but I need wifi in order to download it. Ended up digging out an old ethernet cable from a dusty closet and crawling under another closet to connect it to the modem. Not pleasant!

Of course, most of the problem lies with hardware vendors who don't release fully functional open-source Linux drivers for their gadgets. But since when does the average user care whose fault it is that their trackpad doesn't work? The great thing about this Dell release is that all their drivers are fully functional and freely available as a PPA. Because without those drivers, few of today's latest PC laptops work with Linux out of the box.

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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:37 UTC] No.4848228[source]▶
Your doing it wrong [1] A Single data point does not a result make. Others have had no problems with that exact laptop. For a counter point I could never get the CD-ROM hotplug working on my old dell laptop in windows. Clearly windows doesn't support CD-ROMS.

1. http://www.linlap.com/hp_mini_210

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nicholassmith ◴[29 Nov 12 15:46 UTC] No.4848292[source]▶
But you're applying the data point of "I didn't have any problems" as your generalisation, I can say from having installed Linux on a weird amount of laptops recently that occasionally things like the trackpads will not have full features, occasionally webcams will fail to be found and/or not work properly and so on. But the thing is, that's just my experience with one specific distro (Ubuntu 11.04) out of the box, and shouldn't be taken for a whole.
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dkhenry ◴[29 Nov 12 15:55 UTC] No.4848352[source]▶
Things will break, I fully agree, but for the most part they work really really well. I have installed Linux on scores of laptops , and I have seen some stuff just not work, but in general ( and I think you will find this to be the consensus around the community ) it works great and most laptops work with nothing more then a fresh install of your Distro of choice .
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1. nicholassmith ◴[29 Nov 12 16:01 UTC] No.4848385[source]▶
Don't get me wrong, for the most part things do seem to work really well, staggeringly so when you think about how much clout a free upstart like Linux should have. However, certain hardware has got poor support on Linux and people do get bitten by it every now and again, my argument was mostly your single data point, and my single data point and kijin's data point don't make a conclusive one as the same model of laptop might actually have a WiFi card from one manufacturer which craps out or one that works perfectly.

But for the most part Linux does cover hardware pretty well, and I've not seen a 'core' part of a laptop not work properly for a long while.